NEVER RAN, NEVER WILL Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner CityBy Albert Samaha Illustrated. 343 pp. PublicAffairs. $28

In the summers of 1973 and 1974, a former college football star turned aspiring writer named Rick Telander inhabited the basketball courts of Foster Park in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Flatbush. Sometimes playing, occasionally coaching, always acutely observing, Telander produced a book, “Heaven Is a Playground” (1976), that chronicled the dazzling talent and fragile dreams of asphalt wizards like Fly Williams and Albert King. At the intersection of youthful talent and the high-stakes world of N.C.A.A. basketball, Telander portrayed the most morally complicated character of all, Rodney Parker, an unofficial agent who may or may not have been taking payoffs to deliver stellar players to certain schools.

More than 40 years later, “Heaven Is a Playground” remains an iconic book of sports journalism. By my lights, it informed all the subsequent nonfiction renderings of sports in urban, black America, serving as both the inspiration and the common ancestor for such acclaimed works as “Hoop Dreams,” Steve James’s documentary about two high school basketball stars in Chicago, and “The Ticket Out,” Michael Sokolove’s book about the Crenshaw High School baseball team in South Central Los Angeles that included the future Met slugger Darryl Strawberry.

Now comes Albert Samaha, a first-time author, with “Never Ran, Never Will.” Whether deliberately or by coincidence, he has set himself an especially daunting task, because his book about two seasons with a youth football team takes place in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, just down Linden Boulevard from Telander’s Flatbush, and considers in almost identical ways how sports impacts the lives of young, nonwhite, often at-risk players. Does a game like football offer lifesaving discipline, fatherly coaches and means to a scholarship? Or is it just a cruel chimera, holding out the allure of an elusive pro career? And, to add a very current concern, is the risk of a head injury at a tender age worth the potential rewards of stardom?

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In plumbing these profound questions, Samaha immerses himself with the Mo Better Jaguars for the 2013 and 2014 seasons. Even though the Jaguars’ three teams extend only from ages 7 to 13, existential consequences hang over their efforts. The team’s head coach, Chris Legree, who was motivated to found the Jaguars by his participation in the Million Man March, has sent four players into the N.F.L., others to college scholarships at top-rung football schools like Syracuse, and dozens to scholarships at elite private high schools like Poly Prep. But despite his ardent, paternal efforts, which Samaha captures vividly, Legree has also watched about 30 former players end up in prison. One of Legree’s best players ever was shot dead at age 19.

As Legree tells one player who shows signs of choosing the street over the gridiron: “You ain’t the first guy. I’ve been around guys like you a lot of years and I know the signs. I’m always worried about you getting hooked up with the wrong people. You could get out of it and get on the right track, but you gotta be honest with me and I got to know what you want. Some guys don’t wanna be helped. The coaches, they were looking for you the other day. Because I think you got a future. You got a chance. But no one wants to deal with problems. Courts, cops, gangs, stealing, drugs.”

A former college football player who now reports on criminal justice for BuzzFeed, Samaha brings empathy and scrutiny to his reporting. But his book suffers from structural problems and an inexplicable lapse in ethical judgment when it comes to identifying his characters. Sadly, these problems all could have been rectified with a firmer editing hand.

The 2014 season supplies the core of the book’s drama, yet Samaha devotes the first 70-plus pages to the essentially ephemeral 2013 games. Some of his finest character portraits of coaches and parents turn up only toward the book’s end. It’s also hard to understand why Samaha uses only partial names or nicknames for all of the players — even though, in a recent essay for The Times, he was perfectly capable of fully identifying several of the Jaguars and even using their photographs.

Even so, there is much to enjoy and at the best moments to admire in this book. Samaha may not finish in the top echelon of Telander disciples, the way James and Sokolove did, but “Never Ran, Never Will” proves the continued salience of urban sports as a subject for exploring larger issues of race and class.

Samuel G. Freedman is the author of eight books, including “Breaking the Line,” about black college football and the civil rights movement.